SteelPlated Cocoon
by AragothwinElfBlade
Summary: Drabble: She wasn't even pretty.


Author's Note: This isn't part of my Talk It Out series. Done for the psych30 #10: Approach-Aviodence, and dedicated to every girl whose had one of those days.

* * *

She's always been jealous of other girls. Their tans are perfect, their hair styled, and their movements...How they move is what she covets the most. Arms and legs moving in harmony on a figure whose posture is perfect, more than she could ever manage.

High school is a tough time. For her, it was tougher than most. It was the year she learned she could never move like the other girls her age. She'd always been smarter than the others, terrifyingly so it sometimes seemed, but while the rest of the girls became women, she was left in their dust for the first time in her life. While she watched others exchange gawky extensions for willowy limbs and soft curves for boney angles it seemed her own body was stuck in stasis. The alienation was complete for someone already on the outside.

Hunched shoulder and a perpetual scowl became her armor against the rest of them. Her arms were always crossed on her chest, protecting and out of the way so people wouldn't see how clumsy she was. There wasn't much she could do about her feet, but she took up a shuffling stride that ensured she'd never trip over them. The odd stance only highlighted her other flaws, which had seemed only minor before, the pug nose, the hair that always frizzed, her awkward way of speaking...

Her defense mechanisms only increased the magnitude of her exile from her peers, if that was even possible. In response to the hurt she picked up an attitude to match her posture. She became a 'snarky, hostile, little bitch' as her oft aggrieved step-mother liked to describe her. And Chloe lived up to that description whenever she could.

She'd caught up eventually. But by the time college came around she was too deep within her protective cocoon to leave. Whatever chance she'd had of becoming a beautiful had seemingly vanished. It was something she mourned on occasion.

One drunken night with Chase, they had started drinking together on their days off after Jack went undercover, she had told him how she felt. "I'm just plain," she slurred with tears in her eyes. "The rest of them are butterflies. The pretty ones with colorful wings, floating on the breeze. And here I am a big, fat, ugly moth." Liquid splashed out of her glass as she gestured with it. "No wonder I can't get a date. Nobody likes moths."

Chloe had to give him credit. Not only was a Chase male, and therefore totally incapable of handling emotional issues, he was smashed, but he managed to stumble over and envelope her in a reassuring bear hug anyways. "Your beautiful, Chloe. Anybody who tells you otherwise is blind or stupid." She hadn't believed him then and didn't now. Not only was Chase drunker than her at the time, but he was also a friend and wanted to make her feel better. Not that he remembered her little sob session the next morning, being to busy nursing his hangover to care.

Despite Chase's minor failure to remember her drunken rant, he'd been the one she'd shown the dress to. The dress she'd never wear because only someone beautiful should wear it. So it sat in the back of her closet because she couldn't bring herself to toss it out. When she was feeling particularly brave she put it on, but never in front of a mirror. That way she could pretend to be beautiful, pretend someone wanted her for her, not so he could use her to get something for his terrorist boss. Oh, no, she wasn't bitter over the Spencer thing in the least.

Then, Chase was long gone. Two for two and a strange man in her bed. Maybe moth was a bad description; black widow was probably more accurate.

She snorted and took a sip of whiskey, the same kind she and Chase always drank. Chloe O'Brien, deadly moth with access to classified computer systems and no love life or best friend in sight. What a life.

_Fini_

I can feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful

So unloved for someone so fine

I can feel so boring for someone so interesting

So ignorant for someone of sound mind

Alanis Morissette "So Unsexy"


End file.
